“Thank you, Tony,” said Mrs. Lester.
It was a fine enough night for them all to go into the garden, and very soon Maradick and Mrs. Lester were alone. It was all about him once again, the perfume that she used, the rustle of her dress, the way that her hair brushed his cheek. But behind it, in spite of himself, he saw his wife’s face in the mirror, he saw Tony, he saw the tower, and he felt the wind about his body.
She bent over him and put her arms about his neck; but he put them back.
“No,” he said almost roughly, “we’ve got to talk; this kind of thing must be settled one way or the other.”
“Please, don’t be cross.” Her voice was very gentle; he could feel her breath on his cheek. “Ah, if you knew what I’d been suffering all day, waiting for you, looking forward, aching for these minutes; no, you mustn’t be cruel to me now.”
But he stared in front of him, looking into the black depths of the trees that surrounded them on every side.
“No, there’s more in it than I thought. What are we going to do? What’s going to happen afterwards? Don’t you see, we must be sensible about it?”
“No,” she said, holding his hand. “There is no time for that. We can be sensible afterwards. Didn’t you hear at dinner? Fred is going away on Thursday night; we have that, at any rate.”
“No,” he said, roughly breaking away from her, “we must not.”
But she pressed up against him. Her arm passed slowly round his neck and her fingers touched, for a moment, his cheek. “No; listen. Don’t you see what will happen if we don’t take it? All our lives we’ll know that we’ve missed it. There’s something that we might have had—some life, some experience. At any rate we had lived once, out of our stuffy lives, our stupid, dull humdrum. Oh! I tell you, you mustn’t miss it! You’ll always regret, you’ll always regret!”